I discovered that there are substances you can smoke or inject or snort that will jumble your senses, that there are people capable of gambling away their mother at a baccarat table, and that there are passions of the flesh that allow for far more combinations than just those of a man and a woman horizontally on a mattress. I learned, too, that there are things that happen in the world that my dim education had never touched upon: I found out that years earlier there had been a great war in Europe, that Germany was being ruled by someone called Hitler who was admired by some and feared by
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